Hey Juan!
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Juan Lang juan.lang@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I think enhancing explorer to have its own GUI (rather than launching winefile) would be an interesting project. If nothing else, having a graphical way to explore the shell namespace might be handy for debugging shell issues. From there to an explorer for desktop mode might not be such a big leap.
Enhancing our explorer to be a full explorer replacement would be cool with me too, there were just a few reasons I suggested using Program Manager and Winefile rather than trying to extend explorer for the UI
1. Its kind of massive and I don't think we need all of that for desktop mode. I view desktop mode as kind of a corner case that only should be used like 5% of the time. 2. We have winefile and the Program Manager already and both are in really bad shape. They have for the most part bit-rotted in the tree for as long as I can remember. It would be nice to see them polished for Wine 1.0 3. This is just my taste but I don't really like having a Window style explorer bar running in a window. It would make Wine feel more like a VM like environment to me. Maybe we want that for Desktop mode to further try to discourage users from running it, like case 1.
I'd like to see when Desktop mode is invoked, a working Program Manager launch that already has program groups for all of the installed Shortcuts plus existing Winelib applications we ship in the tree. Perhaps even a My Computer group minimized with support for the Shell Namespace builtin and or support for launching winefile with shellnamespace support. I know its a bit of a departure from the normal Windows UI and some may even say using the Program Manager like that is a throwback to Windows 3.1 but it just seems like it would flow better from a UI perspective. Plus it would leverage the code we already have in tree.
All of that being said I don't know if I could mentor such a project anyway, just throwing out ideas. As with everything it really comes down to what Julliard wants.